Looking for the perfect pair of headphones? Ars has the lowdown on seven …

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Introduction

Since the portable headphone review that we conducted last year, there has been a strong demand from our regular readers for a review on full-sized headphones and even portable headphone amplifiers. Headroom was nice enough to send us another batch of headphones and even a couple headphone amplifiers.

Unless you've been living under a rock, it is safe to say that we all know what headphones are. Unfortunately, not all headphones are made equal. High Fidelity (a.k.a., HiFi) headphones are headphones that are held to higher acoustical standards than the run-of-the-mill headphones that come with portable Cassette/CD/MP3 players (yes, that includes the iPod.)

When deciding on which headphones to include in this review, we came up with a list of criteria that had to be met:

Price range: To acquire a HiFi set of headphones, one typically needs to spend at least $60, but can spend as much as $12,000. In this case, we set a ceiling of $350 since most people cannot justify spending more than that on headphones.

Audio quality: Many somewhat expensive headphones do not offer good quality despite their higher prices. We picked models renowned for their superiority over similarly priced models.

Comfort: Let's face the facts, if you are going to be spending this kind of cash on headphones, you will probably end up wearing them a lot.

Terrible-sounding headphones were just not acceptable for this review. This time around, our contacts at Headroom sent us 4 sets of headphones and we included 4 additional sets that we already had in the lab. In addition, Headroom sent us 2 portable headphone amps.

The IBM T42p laptop was used in conjunction with the USB-based Bithead to ensure that the audio stayed digital all the way to the headphone amplifier. Therefore, the laptop had no effect on the sound quality.

Music used in the test

The music used in this test consisted of a variety of tracks selected from various albums and genres to represent a wide range of acoustical situations. The digital sources consisted of either lossless audio (FLAC), high-quality MP3 (LAME -alt preset Extreme), and Ogg Vorbis (quality = 7 or 8).

We listened to the following 11 tracks heavily when making our observations on each headphone: